When people talk about a British band "breaking America," it usually implies a level of success at home, and a hope to match those sales abroad. With the Wave Pictures, it's a bit more mundane. They're just trying to get over here: If You Leave It Alone and Instant Coffee Baby were respectively their seventh and eighth LPs, and thanks to a distribution deal with Moshi Moshi, in 2010 they were packaged as a double album to become their first commercially available release in the U.S.
But mundanity is fitting for the Wave Pictures, since the characters in Dave Tattersall's verbose but musically unadorned short stories do very mundane things: spend days at the seaside, scoop ice cream, get involved in go-nowhere relationships. If this recalls Art Brut or the Streets, you're not far off, since the Wave Pictures are most definitely a lyrics-first act and a distinctly British one. That's usually a tough sell to begin with, but the problem with Beer in the Breakers isn't one of culture or slang so much as a narrator who is almost wholly forgettable-- their stories are boring.
The key distinction is that these songs are more often being told to you as opposed to shared, even if the first lyric ("I swam out to greet you") suggests a conversation happening with the listener. Tattersall fires off some nice images and bon mots-- "Who are you to tell me that I look depressed/ You wouldn't even know if I'm at my best" is particularly pithy-- but they merely sit in place hoping to be admired rather than meeting the listener halfway.
Tattersall's British wit may be appropriately dry, but the Wave Pictures' arrangements are basically deserted, little more than sprightly Stratocaster chords and a polite rhythm section that could easily hold residency at a local coffee shop. "Little Surprise" at least lives up to its name with a brisk quasi-Afro-pop riff, and elsewhere the more upbeat numbers recall the ultra-clean guitar work of Orange Juice. But anytime the tempo slows, they lapse into a tedium that becomes irritating-- particularly on the title track, where the vast pockets of space in the production almost allow you to hear the Wave Pictures losing interest in real time.
Unless the Mars Volta have a new album in the works, I'm not sure if I'll hear a record with more guitar solos this year (credit "Blue Harbour" for at least having a bass solo). And they appear at nearly the same point at every track, played with a technical precision very rare in indie circles, but after the initial surprise wears off, you can mostly imagine Tattersall pulling off those slow bends and sustained vibrato while rocking his best G.E. Smith face. Rather than anticipating a crescendo or introducing an intriguing melodic turn, they simply kill time-- the most mundane activity of them all.
